believe” it in the abstract; like any mythos, it depended upon the rituals associated with the cult of a particular holy place to make what it signified a reality in the lives of participants.The same...

Pain is something that’s common to human life. When we ignore it, we aren’t engaging in the whole reality, and the pain begins to fester.

In the tenth century BC, the priests of India devised the Brahmodya competition, which would become a model of authentic theological discourse. The object was to find a verbal formula to define the Brahman, the...

Jesus did not spend a great deal of time discoursing about the trinity or original sin or the incarnation, which have preoccupied later Christians. He went around doing good and being compassionate.

In the past some of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians, such as Maimonides, Aquinas and Ibn Sina, made it clear that it was very difficult to speak about God, because when we...

This was the scientific age, and people wanted to believe that their traditions were in line with the new era, but this was impossible if you thought that these myths should be understood literally. Hence...

Mohammed was not an apparent failure. He was a dazzling success, politically as well as spiritually, and Islam went from strength to strength to strength.

Compassion is not a popular virtue.

[T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68)

Every fundamentalist movement I’ve studied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is convinced at some gut, visceral level that secular liberal society wants to wipe out religion.

…a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to...

Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don’t want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity.

Islam is a religion of success. Unlike Christianity, which has as its main image, in the west at least, a man dying in a devastating, disgraceful, helpless death.

We can either emphasize those aspects of our traditions, religious or secular, that speak of hatred, exclusion, and suspicion or work with those that stress the interdependence and equality of all human beings. The choice...

Ironically, the first thing that appealed to me about Islam was its pluralism. The fact that the Koran praises all the great prophets of the past.

Human beings have always been mythmakers.

If it is not tempered by compassion, and empathy, reason can lead men and women into a moral void. (95)

The values of Islam are expressed by Muslims clearly. September 11 changed the world, and put Muslims on the spotlight.

We have seen that a myth could never approached in a purely profane setting. It was only comprehensible in a liturgical context that set it apart from everyday life; it must be experienced as part...

The hajj is one of the five essential practices of Islam; when they make the pilgrimage to Mecca, Muslims ritually act out the central principles of their faith.

For centuries, the Muslims were able to co-exist perfectly well with Jews and Christians in the Middle East.

I had failed to make a gift of myself to God.

I have a very sharp tongue, I’m very impatient, and it’s a lifelong struggle.

I have nothing maternal in me, and men want to be mothered a lot of the time.

Compassion dervies from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning “to suffer, undergo or experience.” So “compassion” means “to endure [something] with another person,” to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes, to feel her...

Yes, all fundamentalists feel that in a secular society, God has been relegated to the margin, to the periphery and they are all in different ways seeking to drag him out of that peripheral position,...

We are meaning-seeking creatures. Dogs, as far as we know, do not agonise about the canine condition, worry about the plight of dogs in other parts of the world, or try to see their lives...

But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a...

The first person to promulgate the Golden Rule, which was the bedrock of this empathic spirituality, was Confucius 500 years before Christ.

We are absolutely right to condemn the suicide bomber’s targeting of innocent civilians and mourn his victims. But as we have seen, in war the state also targets such victims; during the 20th century, the...

Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely...

Even before 9/11 I was gripped by a sense of dread: our lack of criticism about what we were doing in the Middle East – the slagging off of a whole religious tradition.

Then, as now, there would always be people who preferred the option of devoting their religious energies to sacred space over the more difficult duty of compassion.

Compassion doesn’t, of course, mean feeling sorry for people, or pity, which is how the word has become emasculated in a way.

What seems wrong to you is right for himWhat is poison to one is honey to someone else.Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,These mean nothing to Me.I am apart from all that.Ways of...

Compassion is a practically acquired knowledge, like dancing. You must do it and practice diligently day by day.

There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there’s bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.

When the horror recedes and the world resumes its normal shape, you cannot forget it. You have seen what is “really” there, the empty horror that exists when the consoling illusion of our mundane experience...

I am not interested in the afterlife. Religion is supposed to be about losing your ego, not preserving it eternally in optimum conditions.

There is a danger in monotheism, and it’s called idolatry. And we know the prophets of Israel were very, very concerned about idolatry, the worship of a human expression of the divine.

The new atheists show a disturbing lack of understanding of or concern about the complexity and ambiguity of modern experience, and their polemic entirely fails to mention the concern for justice and compassion that, despite...

In the holy city of Mecca, violence of any kind was forbidden. From the moment they left home, pilgrims were not permitted to carry weapons, to swat an insect or speak an angry word, a...

Saint Augustine … insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and...

Compassion is the key in Islam and Buddhism and Judaism and Christianity. They are profoundly similar.

A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.

Yet the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the traditional apprehension of mythology. It can be seen as a form of meditation. Readers have to live with a novel...

It’s a great event to get outside and enjoy nature. I find it very exciting no matter how many times I see bald eagles.

After I left the convent, for 15 years I was worn out with religion, I wanted nothing whatever to do with it. I felt disgusted with it. If I saw someone reading a religious book...

poisons everything.” They see themselves in the vanguard of a scientific/rational movement that will eventually expunge the idea of God from human consciousness.But other atheists and scientists are wary of this approach. The American zoologist...

Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms as monotheists describe God.